The present disclosure relates to an ultrasonic consolidation (UC) and, more particularly, to a UC machine and a method of using a UC machine to form integrated printed electronics.
UC is a process in which very thin strips of material are laid down and ultrasonically welded together (similar to friction stir welding) to create a low temperature, permanent bond joint. Generally, UC does not allow for the inclusion or addition of electronics or electrical features in the same process as the ultrasonic welding. Meanwhile, traditional assembly methods for assembling substrates populated with electronics onto housings using standard methods, such as bolted joints and wedgelocks, do not typically provide paths for easy anti-tamper implementations. In addition, for thermal dissipation of mounted electronics, heat must be conducted through the mounting substrate to a secondary thermal sink and this tends to result in material thermal resistance and additional edge temperature increases.
That is, for parts formed by way of conventional UC processing, electronic devices like simple sensors are manually inserted during the UC processing and for more complex structures printing of electronics is often required. Therefore, if a part is to be formed by way of UC processing and has printed electronics integrated in or on the structure, the UC fabrication process must be stopped so that the part can be transferred to a separate machine for printing electronics and then transferred back to the UC machine. This would be repeated as many times as necessary until the assembly of the desired part is completed.
The repeated stopping and restarting of the UC process and the repeated transfer of the part out of the UC processing machine to the electronics printing machine and vice versa may lead to tolerance and alignment issues that negatively affect yield, fabrication time and costs.